Jerusalem is transformed into a Christian crusader state following the First Crusade. Several principalities are carved out of the Muslim empire as well, but before long, a Second and Third Crusade are fought, shifting the balance in favor of the Muslims, who retake the lauded city. Five crusades would follow before the crusading fervor expired, but the wars would weaken the Byzantine Empire, leading to its fall.
Show Transcript
Shalom, and welcome to our history podcast. This is a production of Kingdom Preppers.org. I’m your host, Kingdom Prepper, and you’re listening to: Churchianity: Two Thousand Years of Leaven. We continue with our history.
Part 20: Crusade Aftermath
As seen at the end of our previous podcast, Jerusalem was captured by Christians from the west in the First Crusade on July 15, 1099 after a long and bloody siege. Following their victory, the reconquered lands were organized along the lines of the western European ideal. The Greek Church was ended and the former patriarch forced to flee to Cyprus. He was replaced by an Italian primate, but the papacy had ultimate ecclesiastical rule. New parishes and monasteries were established, with the entire kingdom functioning under Latin rites. The noble Godfrey of Bouillon was named “Protector of the Holy Sepulcher,” the most important church in Palestine among Christians, because its grotto was believed to have held the body of the Messiah prior to his resurrection. Godfrey’s brother Baldwin became Godfrey’s vassal as Count of Edessa, with the other two vassals being the count Bohemund, who became Prince of Antioch, and Raymond of Toulouse, who became Count of Tripoli.
Upon Godfrey’s death in 1100, his brother Baldwin I succeeded him, but he wanted to be crowned the first Frankish King of Jerusalem and not exist merely as its protector. A few necessary steps had to be taken in order to secure that title, however.
“First, he would have to undergo a coronation.”
Writes Thomas Asbridge, in his book The Crusades.
“This centuries-old rite usually involved a crown-wearing, but this was not—as might be imagined—the centerpiece of the ceremony.”
That particular honor came in the form of ritual anointment, when what was thought to be “consecrated” chrism—usually a mixture of oil and balsam—was poured on a prospective ruler’s head by a person believed to be a representative of the Most High on earth …
“… such as an archbishop, patriarch, or pope. It was this act that set a king apart from other men; that imbued him with the numinous power of divine sanction. To achieve this elevation, Baldwin needed to reach some form of accommodation with the church.”
He managed to do so, and his anointing took place on December 25, 1100, in a Catholic ceremony stolen directly from the Hebrew Scriptures, and of course corrupted. Samuel, a true representative of Yah, in that he was a prophet and judge, is seen anointing the Benjamite Saul as the first king of Israel by pouring oil on his head in 1 Samuel 10. That said, when Baldwin became king of Jerusalem, he handed Edessa to a distant cousin, who was also named Baldwin. Under the original Baldwin, Jerusalem was expanded after several successful battles were fought over the course of eighteen years. Upon the king’s death, his cousin Baldwin left Edessa to rule Jerusalem as Baldwin II.
Now, with the capture of Jerusalem in 1099—and Jerusalem becoming a sovereign state—many of the Crusaders—those who had no intention to settle the new territory—saw no need to remain. They made preparations to return to the west. Raymond of Toulouse, who desired to rule Jerusalem but was passed over for Godfrey, left in disgust, but turned back just as a Fatimid Muslim army marched on Jerusalem. Godfrey barely had the necessary contingent of knights to defend his city. When the Muslims camped at Ascalon, Raymond and his crusade forces ambushed and defeated them. Eventually, the surrounding enemies—the emirs of Caesarea, Acre, Ascalon, and Arsuf—surrendered to Godfrey, accepting him as overlord. The sheiks of Transjordan also submitted, but Jerusalem would be threatened by these hostile and bitter enemies for the next twenty-five years. The city, which was weak in certain areas, would struggle to maintain its independence. To shore up this weakness, two military orders were established, both made up of murderous monks, truth be told.
“As far back as 1048 the merchants of Amalfi had obtained Moslem permission to build a hospital at Jerusalem for poor or ailing pilgrims.”
Writes Will Durant, in his book, The Age of Faith.
“About 1120 the staff of this institution was reorganized by Raymond du Puy as a religious order vowed to chastity, poverty, obedience, and the military protection of Christians in Palestine; and these Hospitallers, or Knights of the Hospital of St. John, became one of the noblest charitable bodies in the Christian world. About the same time (1119) Hugh de Payens and eight other crusader knights solemnly dedicated themselves to monastic discipline and the martial service of Christianity.”
From Baldwin II, these nine knights acquired a residence near what was believed to be the site of Solomon’s Temple, thus they were known as the Knights Templar.
“St. Bernard drew up a stern rule for them, which was not long obeyed; he praised them for being ‘most learned in the art of war,’ and bade them ‘wash seldom,’ and closely crop their hair. ‘The Christian who slays the unbeliever in the Holy War,’ wrote Bernard to the Templars, in a passage worthy of Mohammed, ‘is sure of his reward; more sure if he himself is slain. The Christian glories in the death of the pagan …’
Because the Messiah, he goes on to say …
“ ‘[I]s thereby glorified’; men must learn to kill with a good conscience if they are to fight successful wars.”
The uniform of the Hospitaller was a black robe, the left sleeve of which featured a white cross. The Templar, by contrast, wore a white robe that featured a red cross on the mantle. The orders despised each other. While they defended pilgrims and provided them with medical treatment, both the Hospitallers—who were 600 strong—and Templars—who numbered only 300—leveled attacks on Saracen bases. In the year 1180, both orders were important factions in the crusade and proved to be able warriors, which earned them respect. This is evident from the financial support they were given by both the church and the state, and rich and poor alike. Over time, the wealth of both orders increased, peaking in the thirteenth century with Europe boasting considerable estates for Hospitallers and Templars. These included abbeys, villages, and even towns. While the battles of the Crusade raged on, these two orders enjoyed unprecedented luxury.
Jerusalem had been sparsely populated until 1115, when Baldwin II decided to address that issue by turning to Transjordan, from which he imported Syrian Christians. They were lured to the city by the promise of certain privileges, and were settled in empty houses in the city’s northwest corner. The Syrian Christians went to work building new churches for their worship and restoring damaged ones. In a short time, the city’s population swelled to thirty thousand, and Jerusalem functioned as a capital city once more. The Franks looked to it as a primary metropolis because of its historical significance in the Scriptures. But it was operated like a western city, with civil and criminal courts, and even a high court reserved for the nobility; and markets were preserved from the days of the Roman forum. Its chief industry, however, was the tourist trade. Since it could not become a trading center due to its great distance from popular trade routes, thriving merchants could not establish a base there, thus tourism was elevated.
Under Baldwin I, Jerusalem ceased to be run as a theocracy. He filled the highest ecclesiastical office with patriarchs who were subservient to him. While the patriarch had jurisdiction over Jerusalem’s old Christian Quarter beginning in 1112, Baldwin controlled the rest of the city. Ironically, this left Jerusalem—which was once the center of spiritual life for Israelites, and later Christians and many Muslims—as a metropolitan center that was far more secular than many European states. With the coming of Baldwin II, the Franks began converting many existing fortresses into castles, to which they added new buildings that created a ring that encircled the kingdom. Fortified monasteries and churches also circled Jerusalem, and stone walls were raised to keep out invaders. Jerusalem, in other words, became a military state poised for war. And war of course did come. In 1144, an important principality of the Crusaders, Edessa, fell into the hands of the Sultan of Aleppo. And because of this …
“The Second Crusade of 1144 was preached by St. Bernard of Clairvaux, the moral leader of the mid-twelfth-century church …”
Writes Norman F. Cantor, in his book The Civilization of the Middle Ages. And the Second Crusade was preached …
“… in response to urgent entreaties from the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem for aid against the resurgent Arabic power. St. Bernard succeeded in inducing two of the crowned heads of Europe, Louis VII of France and Conrad III of Germany, to take the cross. The inclusion of the two kings provided more prestige than the first crusade had enjoyed but no more military prowess, for Louis and Conrad were not renowned for their skill on the battlefield or the size of their armies. They never reached Palestine, their forces being cut to pieces in Asia Minor.”
While the First Crusade succeeded in capturing territory along the eastern Mediterranean coast and beyond—creating several feudal crusader states, including the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, which lasted for centuries—the costly Second Crusade achieved nothing, and simply dissipated after two years. A massive army of Crusaders was annihilated, yet Jerusalem remained in Christian hands. But that would change toward the end of the twelfth century.
The First Crusade created a frenzy that would be unmatched by the crusades that followed, but the policy of crusading in fact led to widespread corruption within the church. Crusading was an expensive undertaking, not least because the crusader states needed to be maintained. For one thing, the pope was obligated to provide legates for the new Christian territories that were seized, and funds had to be raised to cover the cost. Spiritual benefits were therefore sold to penitent sinners, creating a new market of sorts.
Traditionally, a Catholic would confess their sins to a priest, who, upon hearing the confession would proclaim the confessor’s sin forgiven (again, this was blasphemy according to the very Good News books that were read by these Christians). However, the confession had to be accompanied by a penalty that would satisfy the debt for the sin committed—an act of penance in other words. This would show that the confessor was sincere in his or her repentance. But if the penitent sinner should die before carrying out this act of penance, Augustine of Hippo and Gregory the Great’s concept of purgatory would be the final opportunity to secure eternal life. Thus, be it in life or in purgatory, penance could be carried out, this being known as “temporal” punishment. So goes the traditional Catholic doctrine at any rate—the one that existed prior to the crusades.
For as long as the system of confession had existed within the church, priests could only remit, or remove, part of a sinner’s temporal punishment, and were never granted the power to offer full and total pardon to a sinner. When Pope Urban II ascended the papal throne and preached the First Crusade, however, complete remission was offered to Crusaders bound for Jerusalem with a sincere desire to fight for the cause. For those unable to make the trip, the same benefit could be conferred if they simply contributed financially to the cause. In essence, medieval sinners, like Christians and other believers today who dole out fiat currencies to whatever they deem as worthy causes, bought their way into the Kingdom—or so they believed. This is how the popes financed the establishment of legates, and the building of new hospitals and cathedrals in newly conquered territories. But the happy state of affairs wouldn’t last long.
We’ll be back with more exciting scriptural history . . . in a moment.
[MUSICAL INTERLUDE]
We now continue with our podcast.
After the capture of Edessa by the Muslims in 1144, an event that launched the Second Crusade, the new emir of Aleppo, Nur al-Din, attempted to consolidate power. In 1146, Joscelin II, the Frankish count of Edessa, sought to recover his lost capital by assembling an army and making an advance. While the Franks were butchered by a wave of violence in the Second Crusade, and their women taken captive, Christians native to the east were spared by the previous Muslim elite, Zangi, along with their homes. Latin churches were targeted in the war, but Armenian and Syrian churches were bypassed. Muslim armies even took pains to limit damage to Edessa’s fortifications.
Joscelin II, with the aid of Edessa’s Christians, managed to breach Muslin defenses and put the citadel garrison to flight. Nur al-Din got wind of the attack and immediately took action, amassing an army of thousands which he led on a swift march that continued day and night, making for a relentless journey that left horses dead from fatigue. But a large portion of his warriors reached the city in time and forced Joscelin to retreat, though his army suffered heavy casualties.
“With Edessa back in his possession, the emir chose to make a blunt demonstration of his ruthless will.”
Writes Thomas Asbridge.
“Two years earlier, Zangi had spared the city’s eastern Christians; now, as punishment for their ‘connivance’ with the Franks, his son and heir scourged Edessa of their presence. All males were killed, women and children enslaved. One Muslim chronicler remarked that ‘the sword blotted out the existence of all the Christians,’ while a shocked Syrian Christian described how, in the aftermath of this massacre, the city ‘was deserted of life: an appalling vision, enveloped in a black cloud, drunk with blood, infected by the cadavers of its sons and daughters.’ The once vibrant metropolis remained a desolate backwater for centuries to come.… After the failure of the Second Crusade in the late 1140s, Christian Europe’s enthusiasm for holy war had waned dramatically. At the time, some began to question the purity of the papacy and the crusaders.”
A German who chronicled the event at the time wrote of the Second Crusade: “[The Almighty] allowed the Western Church, on account of its sins, to be cast down. There arose, indeed, certain pseudo-prophets, sons of Belial, and witnesses of the anti-[Messiah], who seduced the Christians with empty words.”
Some decades later, in 1187, Saladin, a powerful sultan who had lately emerged, invigorated the Muslims under his charge and effectively united much of the Muslim empire in his quest to launch a new jihad. The Christian leadership in Jerusalem had been locked in bitter feuds, while Saladin readied for a massive invasion of their kingdom. Many towns in Palestine surrendered to them on their march, and Jerusalem fell to Saladin’s forces by October of that year. Unlike the bloodthirsty Christians of the First Crusade in 1099, Saladin decided to spare his enemies upon conquering their city. Not one Christian was killed. Wealthy barons were able to buy their freedom, but the poor were taken as prisoners of war. News of Jerusalem’s capture eventually reached the Christians in the west and Pope Clement III called for a Third Crusade.
“The mixture of tragedy and farce that characterized the second crusade was repeated in the third crusade of 1190, the most ambitious, at least in its inception, of all the Latin expeditions to the Holy Land.”
Writes Norman F. Cantor.
“The power of Saladin was to be challenged by a crusading army that, at least on paper, commanded the greater part of the military resources of Europe. The three greatest rulers of western Europe at the time, Richard the Lion-hearted of England, Philip Augustus of France, and Frederick Barbarossa of Germany, set off for the Holy Land with formidable armies. Barbarossa drowned en route, and the Germans ended by participating only in a token manner. It soon appeared that the cynical Philip Augustus intended only to go through the motions of fighting the Moslems; he was eager to get back home to continue his plotting against the English king.”
But prior to leaving the fight, Philip joined Richard in a two-year siege that won them Acre, and nothing more. After a series of other pointless battles, Richard settled on a truce with Saladin that was to last three years and allow Christian pilgrims to travel freely to Jerusalem. When Richard ended his campaign and departed for home, he was captured by the German emperor and held prisoner until he could promise a large ransom.
“The Third Crusade had freed Acre, but had left Jerusalem unredeemed.”
Writes Will Durant.
“[I]t was a discouragingly small result from the participation of Europe’s greatest kings. The drowning of Barbarossa, the flight of Philip Augustus, the brilliant failure of Richard, the unscrupulous intrigues of Christian knights in the Holy Land, the conflicts between Templars and Hospitallers, and the renewal of war between England and France broke the pride of Europe and further weakened the theological assurance of Christendom. But the early death of Saladin, and the breakup of his empire, released new hopes. Innocent III (1198–1216), at the very outset of his pontificate, demanded another effort; and Fulk de Neuilly, a simple priest, preached the Fourth Crusade to commoners and kings. The results were disheartening.”
At the time, the throne in Constantinople was vied for by two bitter rivals. Pope Innocent was asked by one of them to divert the crusade to the Byzantine empire in order that he might secure the throne, a favor he would kindly repay by supporting the crusade against the Muslims. Pope Innocent refused to do so, but the Venetians, who were to transport the crusaders to Egypt by sea—from which they would launch an attack—instead conspired to divert the crusade to Constantinople for a considerable fee. Venetian trade with Egypt was quite lucrative, and they did not want to disrupt that business, so turning to Constantinople seemed a better alternative.
Through these efforts, Baldwin of Flanders was made emperor of Byzantium, and the new Latin Empire of Constantinople was formed, which lasted over half a century. The Greek patriarch gave way to a Latin one, and east and west seemed to be reunited, but the people of Byzantium soon resisted the rule of the Latin emperor, and splinter states eventually broke off, one of which—the Empire of Nicaea, seized Constantinople, thus ending the Latin Empire. Enmity between east and west further intensified as a result. Byzantium was considerably weakened by the events of the Fourth Crusade and remained a minor player in the Mediterranean world until its fall to the Muslims in 1453.
Though the Fifth Crusade was led by “the King of Jerusalem,” the title was a misnomer, since the city remained under Muslim control. Also, this so-called “King of Jerusalem,” King John, never saw Palestine, and his attacks on Egypt accomplished little in the crusade. The Sixth Crusade was considered a major success in a few small circles, in that Frederick II, who led it, negotiated with the sultan of Egypt, resulting in both men signing the treaty of Jaffa. This amounted to a ten-year truce and Christians taking back Jerusalem, Nazareth, and Bethlehem. Muslims, however, would continue their worship in the city unhindered. In other Christian and Muslim circles, the treaty created outrage and drew protests. To add insult to injury, Frederick, who had been excommunicated by the pope, and who no bishop or priest would crown, decided to crown himself King of Jerusalem at the Holy Sepulcher’s high altar. When the Templars plotted his assassination, he fled the city. A few years after the truce expired, Jerusalem was back in Muslim hands.
The Seventh Crusade did not result in the recapture of Jerusalem by Christians. Led by Louis IX of France (who also led the failed Eighth Crusade that would see him die of fever), the Seventh Crusade was a disaster. The entire army of Crusaders was captured and held prisoner in Egypt in 1250. During this captivity, the elite Muslim party in Egypt was overthrown by an upstart party known as the Mamluks, who founded a new kingdom. Of them, Karen Armstrong, in her book Jerusalem, writes:
“As children they had been enslaved by Muslims, converted to Islam, and then drafted into elite regiments in the Muslim armies. Since their lives had dramatically improved after their capture and conversion, they were usually devoted Muslims, who yet retained a distinct ethnic identity and felt strong solidarity with one another. Now the Bahariyya regiment that had seized control of Egypt would create a new Mamluk state and become a major power in the Near East.”
The ascension of the Mamluks effected no change in Jerusalem’s status in the beginning, but they fended off the invading Mongols in 1260 and captured the city in a decisive battle. Christians would have to live with the loss, but their annual pilgrimages still occurred. The crusading spirit completely died out in Palestine by 1291, the year that the Mamluk sultan Khalil destroyed the Kingdom of Acre, and rid the city of the Franks who had made it their coastal hub. It was not by force that Muslims accomplished this, however. Acre is actually a testament to the vast amount of material wealth that was actually expended to the various crusades. North of Haifa, Acre is home to an enormous castle built by the Crusaders. Its walls are too thick to have been penetrated by medieval weaponry; its storage chambers belowground so vast that food supplies and other materials could outlast the longest siege. Indeed, the French knights who held the castle when the Mamluk Muslims approached in 1291 willingly surrendered, thinking that they had been forgotten by their homeland, from which relief would never come. They left the garrison with their pennants, strewn with decorative crucifixes, waving in the wind high above them.
What the crusades accomplished was blocking the Muslims from controlling the entire Mediterranean coast, which, prior to the First Crusade, they were on the verge of doing. The era of the crusades also saw the merger of religious devotion and military aggression, the combined act of which came with papal promises of spiritual reward—chiefly the complete remission of sins. This ideal normalized the frenzied killing of those considered to be infidels to the Christian mind, and that did not include Muslims alone, but Israelites too. Hebrew Israelites were killed with abandon in this brutal period, not only in Palestine, and not only by Christians, but also in Muslim areas of the Iberian Peninsula at the hands of Berber rulers from the twelfth century onward. Israelites had to leave those regions and settle in Christian-controlled lands which saw them being forced to convert to Christianity in the late fourteenth century. Mass conversions on the part of Israelites followed, but many of them were merely pretending to convert to save their lives while secretly practicing their own ancient culture. With their ultimate victory over the Muslims in the Reconquista, a feat borne out of the crusading spirit, the Spanish and the Portuguese emerged as dominant players on the world stage. The Iberian Peninsula was transformed into a multicultural and ethnically diverse society primed for imperial expansion. Author Norman F. Cantor adds:
“In the end it was a missionary society devoted to ambitious programs and great undertakings, and therefore it was Spain and Portugal that inaugurated the great age of European imperialism in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and created the new civilization of Latin America that could very well be the most dynamic culture of the early twenty-first century. The year 1095 leads directly to 1492, and the Iberian peoples bear the stamp of the crusading culture—its violence, its ambitions, its mobility, and its energy.”
The transatlantic slave trade would result from these imperial ambitions, fulfilling among the most striking prophecies in Scripture that relate to the true people of Israel.
That wraps it up for this episode of Churchianity: Two Thousand Years of Leaven. A production of Kingdom Preppers.org, this episode was written, produced, and hosted by yours truly, Kingdom Prepper. All praise, honor, and glory are due to my boss, Yah Elohim, and to his right hand, Yahushua HaMashiach. You can access the transcript for this episode on our website. Yah willing, our history will continue in the next podcast. Shalom.
Keywords: Ascalon, Hospitaller, Hospitaler, Knights Templar, church of the holy sepulcher, chrism, 1 Samuel 10, anointing Saul, churchianity, two thousand years of leaven, history of Christianity, church history, Hebrew history, kp, kingdom preppers
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